Many planning and scheduling applications require the ability to deal with uncertainty. Often this uncertainty can be characterized in terms of probability distributions on the initial conditions and on the outcomes of actions. These distributions can be used to guide a planner towards the most likely plan for achieving the goals. This work is focused on developing domain-independent heuristics...

The efficient control of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) by immunisation depends not only on the appropriate choice of vaccine in terms of innocuity, potency and strain composition, but also on a series of inter-related zoo-sanitary factors which are equally important. These include: national, centralised planning (including contingency planning) and control; vaccination and revaccination policy; ...

Assessment of dynamic stability in a modern power system (PS) is becoming a stringent requirement both in operational planning and in on-line operation, due to the increasingly complex dynamics of a PS. Further, growing uncertainties in forecast state and in the response to disturbances suggests the adoption of risk-based approaches in Dynamic Security Assessment (DSA). The present paper descri...

Risk planning requires an organization global view, as it is strongly centered in the experience and knowledge acquired in former projects. The larger the experience of the project manager the better will be his ability in identifying risks, estimating their occurrence likelihood and impact, and defining the mitigation and contingency plans. However, project manager risk knowledge cannot stay i...

This paper introduces a multi-criteria method for solving classification problems, called TODIM-FSE. This name was chosen because its structure merges characteristics from two different methods: TODIM and FSE. In order to demonstrate TODIM-FSE, a model was constructed aimed at helping potential users to decide upon suitable contingency plans for oil spill situations. The model is envisaged as e...

This paper uses a case example to review the current legal status of advance directives, as well as their ethical rationale. We draw attention to ongoing efforts to institutionalize advance directives, and to some of the tractable and intractable reasons why advance directives are ineffective. We then introduce the concept of advance care planning, and argue that we should not assume that advan...

Liquidity risk management ranks to key concepts applied in finance. Liquidity is defined as a capacity to obtain funding when needed, while liquidity risk means as a threat to this capacity to generate cash at fair costs. In the paper we present challenges of liquidity risk management resulting from the 20072009 global financial upheaval. We see five main regulatory liquidity risk management is...